Thursday, July 29, 2010

Shinay, or non-meditation is discussed in this blog post. Instead of trying to focus our minds on a particular object or practice, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche suggests we stay relaxed and present to whatever floats into our awareness. Is that easy?

What's not discussed is that in order to do this practice one must relinquish control of experience and emotion, relax the floodgates clenched to keep insecurity at bay. Often when one starts to relax control over what's allowed into the mind one (theoretically) opens to the difficult emotions and memories we suppress, push to the margins of consciousness. In order to hang on to the horse of Shinay, everything has to be OK, the darkness, the sadness, the despair, the hopelessness, greed, the insecurity and its causes, all that is true within the consistency of our being.

Sitting passively, insecurity arises, tugs at our minds, and we do nothing about it. How is that possible? With the foundation that these thought forms that push us one way or antoher and their contents have no reality. They are shadows, clouds, presumptions, superimpositions. When all that arises within our minds becomes cloudlike and empty, these dynamics loose their power. This is the practice of relaxation; not just to relax the jaw, shoulders, eyes, spine, wrists but to relax the very mind that grasps at phenomena as reality, having understood the ignorance that causes appearances to be mistaken for actualities. When the body becomes a temple fortified with the understanding of mind-as-projector, one can truly relax into softness, a softness that contains within it pure potential and sky-like spaciousness.